If gold was used as currency?

What if the government simply stopped making the current bills/coins and only made gold coins? They could make a pure gold coin (would be worth maybe $500 in gold) and the rest could be heavily diluted with some worthless metal to make lower worth coins.

Instead of writing an amount they could simply write the

What if the government simply stopped making the current bills/coins and only made gold coins? They could make a pure gold coin (would be worth maybe $500 in gold) and the rest could be heavily diluted with some worthless metal to make lower worth coins.

Instead of writing an amount they could simply write the weight of the gold. Or they could simply mark them with dollars/cents at a fixed amount (ex. 1 cent is same as 1mg gold). But either way the gold content is the money itself.

I guess the government would only trade with other countries in gold as well. Could this work and what would happen?

Other answer:

Robert D:
You don't need to do that. The dollar could just be linked to a particular weight of gold. It's called having a gold standard for the currency. That approach was found to be too restricting economically.

The Oracle of Omigod:
There is not enough gold to cover our paper. ISIS was going to issue gold money, in which case we would have flooded the area with perfect forgeries.

tia:
No. We already write more money than we have backed up. This is exactly why we got away from the gold standard